Bad Haircut. Tom Perrotta

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       Thirteen

      “It's foolproof,” Kevin explained. “If someone comes in and buys fifteen dollars worth of gas, I just ring up five and keep ten for myself.”

      “What about the pump?” I asked. “Doesn't that keep track?”

      “Not really. It just goes back to zero every time you flip the switch.”

      Gas was expensive that summer, in 1974, and for a few weeks we were rich. Kevin bought me albums, food, and sporting goods with the money he stole from Paul's Amoco. He paid his brother's friend Burnsy to drive us to Yankee Stadium and Bowcraft Amusement Park. Every time I returned from one of these excursions I told my mother the same half-lie. I said that Paul had paid for everything.

      Paul was Kevin's new stepfather. He had met Mrs. Ross on the supermarket checkout line in February and married her in March. When he moved in, he bought Kevin a fantastic ten-speed bike and tried to be his friend. But Kevin didn't want to be friends. He claimed that Paul was a sex maniac.

      “Listen to this,” Kevin said, just a few weeks after the wedding. He slipped a cassette into his tape player and cranked up the volume. All I could hear was loud static with vague murmurs in the background.

      “What is it?”

      “They're humping.” he said. “Can't you tell?”

      He rewound the tape. The murmurs turned into soft moans and deep sighs. I had a hard time connecting these sounds with Kevin's mother, a thin quiet woman who smoked extra-long cigarettes and told him to be careful every time he left the house.

      “I swear,” he said. “It's all they ever do.”

      Kevin's real father had died a long time ago. He had been an amateur boxer. Kevin had once come to a Halloween party dressed in gym shorts and boxing gloves, with his father's jockstrap and huge protective cup fitted over his head like a mask. Whenever someone asked him what he was, he lifted the cup away from his face with his fat leather thumbs and said, “I'm a dick, what are you?”

      A sticky heat wave rolled in early that summer, right after school let out. We got in the habit of going to Kevin's house in the afternoon to watch reruns of The Twilight Zone on channel eleven. Sometimes Kevin's older brother Jack would be there with Burnsy and a couple other guys, smoking pot from a red plastic bong. Jack had just graduated from high school, but he didn't seem too interested in finding a job. He made all the money he needed selling nickel bags to kids who hung out at the Little League and McDonald's. Kevin and I didn't get high—we had just finished seventh grade—but we liked to pretend we did, watching TV through our eyelashes and laughing hysterically at the commercials for Peter Lemongello's Greatest Hits and truck-driver training.

      Paul barged in on us right in the middle of a great Twilight Zone, the one where the businessman steps into a time warp and returns, as an adult, to the world of his childhood. He meets his ten-year-old self on the playground and begs him to appreciate the beauty and wonder of youth while he still has time and not to be in such a big hurry to grow up. The kid pounds his baseball mitt, and says, “Sure, mister, whatever you say.”

      “Wow,” said Jack. “Is that intense or what?”

      We heard keys jangling, but it was too late to move. Paul stood in the doorway looking hot and grimy in his oil-stained work clothes. I thought he was going to deliver a big lecture, but he just turned off the TV and stared at us like we were Martians.

      “Don't you guys have anything better to do?”

      There were six of us in the room. One by one, we shook our heads.

      The next day Kevin and Jack began manning the pumps at Paul's Amoco. Jack hated it so much that he quit after two days and moved down to Seaside, where some guys he knew were renting a house for the summer. Kevin stuck with the job and began stealing from Paul.

      It didn't occur to me to think it was wrong. Ever since I'd met Kevin, he'd been doing crazy things and dragging me along. On the morning of our First Holy Communion, we'd slipped into the Sunday school cafeteria and raided a tray of jelly donuts; we got powdered sugar all over our new blue suits. For our first and only Webelos camping trip, Kevin had shoplifted a gigantic T-bone steak, which we never got around to cooking, though we did have a great time banging each other over the head with it inside our tent. We threw snowballs at cars, ordered pizzas for people we didn't like, and played whiffle ball when there was nothing else to do. He was my best friend.

      The night he told me about the money, Kevin took me to Shoe Town and bought us identical pairs of Puma sneakers. Before we went home, we took off our old sneakers, knotted the laces together, and tossed them at a telephone line on Center Street. We didn't stop until both pairs were dangling from the wire, kicking back and forth like they were walking on air.

      * * *

      I was with Kevin at the St. Agnes carnival in Cranwood the night he first laid eyes on Angela Farrone. We were standing by the food booths, spearing french fries from a paper cone.

      “Look at that,” he said. “By the Porta-John.”

      She was a gum-snapping bleached blond about our age, a knockout in a white tube top and jeans so tight that Kevin said she probably had to pack herself in with a shoehorn. In one hand she held a green helium balloon on a string, in the other a goldfish in a little plastic bag filled with water. The door of the Porta-John popped open and a scrawny redhead stepped out, glancing sheepishly around. She took the balloon from her friend and the two of them entered the moving crowd, like cars merging with highway traffic.

      We followed them past the bake sale, the wheels of fortune, and the creaky rent-a-rides, then out of the carnival and down a sidestreet littered with ripped tickets and greasy paper plates. They stopped beneath a streetlight, huddling together with their backs turned in our direction. The green balloon jerked up and down above their heads. We caught up with them just as they stepped apart, hands empty at their sides. For one miraculous moment the balloon and the fish were suspended in midair, connected by the string. Then they started to rise.

      We stood with our heads back, watching the balloon gain altitude as it drifted upward and eastward over the treetops, toward New York City. The goldfish glinted orange in the light, then disappeared, like a match flaring out.

      “Hey,” Kevin said. “Why'd you do that?” The blond shrugged. СКАЧАТЬ